A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Thus, if there were clear rules about how to migrate quietly to Britain, they would have started first, be white, and second, if you cannot be white, be small in number, and third, if all else fails, feed the brutes. The West Indian migration failed each rule. It was mainly male, young and coming not to open restaurants but to work for wages which could, in part, be sent back home. Some official organizations, from the National Health Service to London Transport, went on specific recruiting drives for workers, nurses or bus-drivers or cleaners, with cheery advertisements in Jamaica for ticket-clippers on London buses. Most of the population shift, however, was driven by migrants themselves desperate for a better life, particularly once the popular alternative of migration to the United States was closed down in 1952. The islands of the Caribbean, dependent on sugar or tobacco for most employment, were going through hard times. As word was passed back about job opportunities, albeit in difficult surroundings, immigration grew fast to about 36,000 people a year by the late fifties. One historian notes the scale of the change: every two years ‘a number equivalent to the total non-white national population in 1951 was arriving in Britain’. The black and Asian population had risen to 337,000 by 1961. And it was concentrated, rather than widely dispersed. Different West Indian groups clustered in different parts of London and the English provincial cities – Jamaicans in the south London areas of Brixton and Clapham, people from Trinidad in west London’s Notting Hill, islanders from Nevis in Leicester, people from St Vincent in High Wycombe, and so on.

  The way these people migrated and made their way had a huge impact on the later condition of post-war Britain and deserves analysis. The fact that so many of the first migrants were young men who found themselves living without wives, mothers or children inevitably created a wilder atmosphere than they were accustomed to in their island homes. They were short of entertainment and short of the social control of ordinary family living. A chain of generational influence was broken and a male strut liberated. Drinking dens, the use of marijuana, ska and blues clubs, and gambling were the inevitable result. A white equivalent might be the atmosphere of the Klondike gold-rush communities, not in general notable for their sobriety and respect for law. Early black communities in Britain tended to cluster where the first arrivals were, which meant in the blighted inner cities. There, as discussed earlier, street prostitution was more open and rampant in the fifties than it would later become; it is hardly surprising that young black men away from home often formed relationships with white prostitutes, and that some then went into pimping. This would feed the press and white gang hysteria about blacks (unsportingly well-endowed, it was thought) stealing ‘our women’. The combination of fast, unfamiliar music, the illegal drinking and drugs and the sexual needs of the young migrants combined to paint a lurid picture of a new underworld. It was no coincidence that the Profumo affair had involved a West Indian drug dealer alongside its cast of aristocrats, politicians, good-time girls and spies.

  More important for the longer term, a rebelliousness was sown in black families which would be partly tamed only when children and spouses began arriving in large numbers in the sixties, and the Pentecostal churches reclaimed at least some of their own. Housing was another crucial part of the story. For the immigrants of the fifties, accommodation was necessarily privately rented since access to council homes was based on a strict list, dependent on how long you had been living in the area. We have already seen how the early squatting revolt was ended by the threat of participants being moved to the back of the council housing queue. So the early immigrants were cooped up in crowded and often condemned old properties – the gaunt Victorian speculative terraces of west London, or the grimy brick terraces of central Leeds. Landlords and landladies were often reluctant to rent to blacks. Once a few houses had immigrants in them, a domino effect would clear streets as white residents sold up and moved. The 1957 Rent Act, initiated by Enoch Powell in his free-market crusade, perversely made the situation worse since it allowed rents to rise sharply, but only when tenants of unfurnished rooms were removed to allow furnished lettings. Powell meant this to allow a cushion of time before rents rose. Its unintended consequence was that unscrupulous landlords such as the notorious Peter Rachman (an immigrant himself) could buy up low-value rented properties, usually with poorer white tenants in them and then – if only he could oust the tenants – pack in new tenants at far higher rents. Thuggery and threats generally got rid of the old. New black tenants, desperate for somewhere to live and charged much higher rents, were then imported. The result was the creation of instant ghettos, in which three generations of black British would live. The Brixton, Tottenham and Toxteth riots of the eighties can be traced back, in part, to the moral effects of early young-male migration and the housing practices of the fifties.

  The other side to the story is the reaction of white Britain. As one Caribbean writer ironically put it, he never met a single English person with colour prejudice. Once he had walked down a whole street, ‘and everyone told me that he or she ’ad no prejudice against coloured people. It was the neighbour who was stupid. If only we could find the “neighbour” we could solve the whole problem. But to find ’im is the trouble! Neighbours are the worst people to live beside in this country.’ Numerous testimonies by immigrants and in surveys of the time show how hostile local people were to the idea of having black or Asian neighbours. The trade unions bristled against blacks coming in to take jobs, possibly at lower rates of pay, just as they had campaigned against Irish migrants a generation earlier. Union leaders regarded as impeccably left-wing lobbied governments to keep out black workers. They were successful enough for a while to create employment ghettos as well as housing ones, though in the West Midlands in particular black migrants gained a toehold in the car-making factories and other manufacturing. Only a handful of MPs campaigned openly against immigration. Powell raised the issue in private meetings though as a health minister he had been keen enough to use migrant labour. But anti-immigrant feeling was regarded as not respectable and not to be talked about. The elite turned its eyes away from the door-slamming and shunning, and escaped into well-meant if windy generalities about the brotherhood of man and fellow subjects of the Crown. Most of the hostility was at the level of street and popular culture, sometimes the shame-faced ‘sorry, the room is taken already’ variety and sometimes violent. The white gangs of the Teddy boy age went ‘nigger-hunting’ or ‘black-burying’ and chalked the ‘Keep Britain White’ signs on walls. They may have been influenced by the small groups of right-wing extremists, such as the Union for British Freedom, or Mosley’s remaining fascist supporters, but the main motivation seems to have been young male competition and territory-marking. These were, after all, the poor white inhabitants of the very same areas being moved into by the migrants.

  All this came to a head in the Notting Hill riots of 1958. Rather like Suez a couple of years earlier, Notting Hill was more a symbol of change than a bloody slaughter. In fact, nobody was killed in the rampaging and by the standards of later riots, there was little physical damage. Furthermore, the trouble actually started far away from London, in the poor St Ann’s district of central Nottingham and only spread to Notting Hill a day later. Yet it was a large and deeply unpleasant outbreak of anti-immigrant violence which ran for a total of six days, across two late summer weekends. It was no coincidence that Notting Hill was the area where the rioting happened as distinct from, say, Brixton, which also had a very large and visible black population by the mid-fifties. It had the most open, well-known street culture for black people, near enough to Soho at one side, and the new BBC headquarters on the other, to be advertised and even celebrated by hacks, broadcasters and novelists. It was known for its gambling dens and drinking clubs. It had a resentful and impoverished white population but also, as two historians of British immigration put it, ‘It had multi-occupied houses with families of different races on each floor. It had a large population of internal migrants, gypsies and Irish, many of t
hem transient single men, packed into a honeycomb of rooms with communal kitchens, toilets and no bathrooms.’

  Into this honeycomb poured a crowd first of tens, and then of hundreds of white men, armed first with sticks, knives, iron railings and bicycle chains, and soon with petrol-bombs too. They were overwhelmingly young, mostly from nearby areas of London, and looking for trouble. They began by picking on small groups of blacks caught out on the streets, beating them and chasing them. They then moved to black-occupied houses and began smashing windows. The crowds swelled until they were estimated at more than 700 strong, whipped up by the occasional fascist agitator, but much more directed by local whites. Racist songs and chants of ‘Niggers Out’, the smash of windows – though some local whites protected and even fought for their black neighbours, this was mob violence of a kind Britain thought it had long left behind. It shrunk away again partly as a result of black men making a stand, and fighting back with petrol bombs. There were 140 arrests, mainly of white youths, and though far-right parties continued to organize in the area, there was no discernible electoral impact, or indeed any more serious trouble. The huge press coverage ensured, however, that Britain went through its first orgy of national introspection about its liberalism and its immigration policy, while overseas racist regimes such as those of South Africa and Rhodesia mocked the hand-wringing British.

  After the riots, many black people did ‘go home’. Returns to the Caribbean soared to more than 4,000. There, West Indian governments expressed outrage at the riot and made it clear that there would be no action by them to restrict migration in order to appease lawless white thugs. Indeed the Commonwealth, whose usefulness has been questioned elsewhere in this history, clearly functioned as a kind of doorstop to maintain immigration. It retained a loose association between Crown, obligation and common citizenship which felt real to politicians of both parties. Pressure to close the open border for Commonwealth citizens hardly increased in the Tory Party after the Notting Hill riots, though extra-parliamentary campaigns, such as the Birmingham Immigration Control Association, did spring up. Of course, given that the violence was directed against immigrants by whites, it would have been grotesquely unfair had the first reaction been to send people home. Labour was wholly against restricting immigration, arguing that it would be ‘disastrous to our status in the Commonweath’. The Notting Hill Carnival, begun the following year, was an alternative response, celebrating black culture openly. For many black migrants, the riots marked the beginning of assertion and organization. They were looked back on as a racial Dunkirk, the darkest moment after which the real fightback would start.

  Only after Macmillan’s stunning 1959 general election victory did pressure really begin to build up for some kind of restriction on immigration to Britain. Opinion polls were now showing strong hostility to the open-door policy. Perhaps as important in Whitehall, both the Ministry of Labour and the Home Office wanted a change to help deal with the new threat of unemployment. This was a case of the political class being pushed reluctantly into something which offended their notion of their place in the world, the father-figures of a global Commonwealth. One study of immigration points out that what was truly remarkable was the passive acceptance by politicians and bureaucrats of Britain’s transformation into a multicultural society: ‘Immigration was restricted a full four years after all measures of the public mood indicated clear hostility to a black presence in Britain, and even then it was only done with hesitation.’ And when the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act finally passed into law, it was notably liberal, at least by later standards, assuming the arrival of up to 40,000 legal immigrants a year with complete right of entry for their dependants. Even so, it had only gone through after a ferocious parliamentary battle, with the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell making emotional and passionate attacks on a measure which was still privately opposed by some of the Tory ministers involved. One particularly contentious issue was that the Republic of Ireland was allowed a completely open border with Britain. This may have seemed only practical politics given the huge number of Irish people living and working there already but it offended in two ways. By discriminating in favour of a country which had been neutral in the war with Hitler and declared itself a republic, but against Commonwealth countries which had stood with Britain, it infuriated many British patriots. Second, by giving Irish people a better deal than Indians or West Indians it seemed frankly racialist.

  The new law created a quota system which gave preference to skilled workers and those with firm promises of employment. In order to beat it, a huge new influx of people set out in 1961 for Britain, the biggest group from the Caribbean but also nearly 50,000 from India and Pakistan and 20,000 Hong Kong Chinese. This ‘beat the ban’ phenomenon would be repeated later when new restrictions were introduced in the seventies. One historian of immigration puts the paradox well: in the three-year period from 1960 to 1963, despite the intense hostility to immigration, ‘more migrants had arrived in Britain than had disembarked in the whole of the twentieth century up to that point. The country would never be the same again.’

  45

  Incident at Birch Grove

  Yet it was Britain’s post-war relationship with Europe, not the fate of the Empire, immigration or the Cold War, which produced some of the deepest cracks in British public life. Why should that be? This was not of prime importance to the people of the country, certainly no more so than the cost of living or the building of a multiculture. What gave it added importance in the corridors and lobbies of the Palace of Westminster was that ‘Europe’ was about them – the importance of MPs and ministers, of mandarins and ambassadors. Britain was fading as head of the Commonwealth and had little leverage with the Washington of Eisenhower and Kennedy. Joining the European Economic Community would either (depending on your point of view) give Britain’s elite a new, well-appointed and large theatre to try to dominate; or it might push them aside in a Babel of competing and alien politicians. By the late fifties, this choice was becoming urgent. The distant echoes ignored by Attlee and Churchill had become a deafening proposition. Across the channel, they had had the builders in.

  After the iron and coal community, which the Durham miners were supposed to have been so against, the six founding EU nations – France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands – had kept designing and laying out bigger structures. The European Defence Community had foundered. But in 1955 a breakthrough had happened in the unlikely setting of a small and undistinguished coastal town in Sicily called Messina. Here the foreign ministers of ‘the Six’ had agreed to move towards a customs union, and combine in transport, atomic know-how and energy policy. The driving force behind this was a squat, pro-British Belgian now formally revered as a European founding father, called Paul-Henri Spaak. Later, he stolidly recalled how the ministers had worked through the night to complete the proposal: ‘The sun was rising over Mount Etna as we returned to our rooms, tired but happy. Far-reaching decisions had been taken.’ The first view from London was that, at any rate, Etna had not erupted. As the negotiations continued in Brussels about what would eventually become the EU, Britain refused to send a minister to take part, choosing instead a formidably bright but middle-ranking civil servant, a trade economist called Russell Bretherton.

  This fox-like little man with a clipped moustache soon realized two things: he was being treated like a very important person by the Europeans and, second, they were deadly serious about trying to build a new political system. Bretherton was regarded by the French, Belgians and Germans as national negotiator when in truth he was a mere observer with written notes about what he could and could not say. In the mythology of the European Union, there is a wonderful story about Bretherton. It tells us that at the end of the negotiations this starchy representative of Her Britannic Majesty stood up and informed the room: ‘Gentlemen, you are trying to negotiate something you will never be able to negotiate. But if negotiated, it will not be ratified. And if ratified, it will not
work.’ He is then supposed to have walked out, no doubt clutching his rolled umbrella. Sadly, it seems unlikely that this ever happened as reported, though it has poetic truth. The continental negotiators were disappointed and shocked by Britain’s lack of serious interest and Bretherton had been given a loftily dismissive brief by his political masters; it was simply less crisp than myth tells us. At any rate the Six shrugged off Britain’s attitude. They were still rebuilding shattered cities and healing torn economies, and for them the coming Union was manifest destiny. The Treaty of Rome duly followed in 1957. Coming so soon after the humiliation of Suez it was greeted by increasingly agitated head-scratching in Whitehall.